Sunday, November 29, 2015

By winning Abu Dhabi today, Rosberg won three races after Hamilton clinched the 2015 championship. I did a bit of digging and found the following drivers winning races after failing to win the driver's championship.

I'm going through old issues of National Geographic. This photo was in an August 1976 article about Venezuela's oil wealth. This Mercedes cost $32,000(!) and there was still a waiting list. It was built at the Barcelona plant, 150 miles east of Caracas.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

The first 15 minutes of this video shows various leaders riding in Hongqis. Only Obama and Putin brought their own cars. Also cool to see six-door E-Class Mercedes and S-Class sedans with police light bars interspersed.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Holy. Fucking. Shit. This New York Times story is even crazier than Turkey shooting down a Russian jet. What's going on in North Africa and the Middle East is beyond tragic, but for the armchair geopolitics buff, the stories are mind blowing.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

From a logistics point of view, this is pretty boss. I assume for the foreseeable future, no one is going to recognize China's sovereignty over the South China Sea, but China will in essence have control over it. The US will keep playing the cat-and-mouse game with its planes and ships but no shots will ever be fired.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

I've been checking reddit.com/r/cars pretty regularly and came upon this post.

Considering that it was a 20 year old car with 26,000 miles and was rarely driven, I think it did pretty well especially given that it cost $305,000 when new. It only broken down badly once with a fuel leak, which required a complete overhaul of the fuel system. This was age-related and probably not Bentley specific. The A/C compressor failed, but once again, it was 20 years old.All in all, I spent around $8,000 in eleven months to drive it 4793 miles.

I paid $26,500 and sold it for $30,500. I don't think this indicates any appreciation of that model, just the work I had done and the presentation. Thankfully, the US dollar appreciated about 10% in between buying and selling, so this saved me a bunch of money after converting everything back to CDN dollars.Here is the break-down. I didn't include fuel in the calculations.

Purchase Price: $26,500 USD or $34,870 CDN in December 2014 Purchased with mileage of 26,227

Thursday, November 05, 2015

Yesterday was my birthday, and I took the day off. I ordered this Maserati-Citroen book to give to myself. In the days preceding my birthday, I was getting annoyed by the fact that it hadn't arrived yet. Apparently, K got it before I saw it in the mailbox and hid it. It was a nice surprise to open it yesterday morning.

Next, we drove down to Silicon Valley to try a Taiwanese joint I had been researching. It is a Chinese tradition to eat noodles for your birthday, and apparently this restaurant has good beef noodle soup. This spread contained the Greatest Hits of my childhood: pickled cabbage, tofu/pork/celery/squid, oyster omelet, beef noodle soup, and a "Taiwanese hamburger".

On our way back to the car, we spotted this BMW i8 parked across from us. The new owner hopped out along with his two friends. They were all very happy. The owner was proud of his new purchase (probably paid for with money from the recent sale of his tech company) and his two friends were wowed by the novelty of the car and seemed genuinely happy for their friend. It was all very sweet.

I then did the impossible. I persuaded K to go to a used Porsche dealership with me. We sat in this 993. Alas, it was an automatic, had been in a crash, and has suspiciously been on the showroom floor for months. Nevertheless, it was nice to sit in one with K. The backseat even has enough room for Cooper the Dog.

Here is K looking for the door handle to get out.

Then, we went to the local BMW dealership to test drive the i3. It looks like we're going to lease it. I need to do some more research first. Apparently, you can get a $2,500 tax credit if your lease is over 30 months (or something like that). Also, you can buy an off-brand (not Bosch) home charger at Home Depot for $600 (includes labor of installation).

We both really liked the car. It's a big step up from the 2004 Civic.

This is the one we drove. It has a range extender (basically a 600 cc motorcycle engine). Some arcane regulation in California requires that the gasoline range be equal to or less than the electric range, so the fuel tank will only accept 1.9 gallons of gas.

We both drove it on the freeway and surface streets. It was very quick and handled well. The short wheelbase took a little getting used to. Also, when you take your foot off the gas, the car comes to almost an immediate stop.

Back to the book. Here are some cool period photos. There are a lot of interviews of people involved in the development of the Citroens and Maseratis of the 1970s.